Gun trade going strong here

Saturday

Feb 16, 2013 at 1:05 PMFeb 16, 2013 at 1:22 PM

Cynthia Grau

With the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution the center of heavy debate, one may wonder how gun sales in Livingston County may or may not be changing.Wes Lane, owner of Pontiac Exchange, who deals in guns, antiques and collectibles, as well as jewelry and electronics, has had more than 30 years of experience involving the pawning, buying and selling of such items.He says gun sales very obviously increased in recent months.“You’re looking at where our handguns always are,” he said, pointing to a glass display case. “There are none. We can’t keep handguns. If we bought 20 handguns today, by the end of the week, they’d be gone. Gun sales are fabulous.” His son, Derek Lane, added that Firearm Owners Identification card applications have quadrupled in recent times.Laws and regulations haven’t changed in the past years in obtaining firearms.“We have 24 hours on a long gun and 72 hours on a handgun,” Wes Lane explained. “You have to show us an FOID card before you can even look at it. After that, you have to fill out a federal form and you answer all the questions, then we run a background check on you by calling the state of Illinois. They do a background check and give us an approval number or denial number,” Wes Lane said. “We get very few denials because most people have a gun card.“The main reason is we have to pay a lot more for guns now, so people that bought a gun last year for $300, now we can give them $400 back for it. There are people that wait in line so we can sell it for $500. There are probably more buyers than sellers, which is why we’re out of guns all the time,” Lane said.Lane added that buyers need to be 18 years of age to own a long gun and 21 to own a handgun.He said that the trend started a few months ago, but really picked up after the mass shooting in Connecticut earlier in the winter.“After the government started this thing about assault rifles and this thing in Sandy Hook, they’ve already figured out that, really, an assault rifle wasn’t used. The government is still pushing on assault rifles. The guy used handguns but they found an assault rifle in his trunk, but they’re still going with the whole assault rifle thing. Some people are leery of them and some people still want to get a gun while they can still get it,” he said.Pontiac Exchange and its sister store, Midwest Exchange in Bloomington, have seen some really historic guns and other items come across their counters.“If there hadn’t been a Pontiac Exchange, there wouldn’t have been a Midwest Exchange, and down at Midwest, we sold a gun, the highest sale ever recorded on the Internet at more than $140,000, which was for Adolf Hitler’s shotgun. About a year or two ago, we sold Jimmy Hoffa’s gun. He had a rifle. This store here (Pontiac) sold a watch that belonged to Jefferson Davis, who was the president of the Confederacy,” Lane said.The selling doesn’t even have to happen at the store itself. Lane said that certain items are taken to auction and are sold on specific online sites, including eBay. Since guns that are sold online need to be sent to a federal firearms licensed dealer, Pontiac Exchange offers the service of being a pickup location for customers, as it has its federal license.The employees at Pontiac Exchange have multiple reference points, materials and websites they use to compare prices, so they’re always doing their best to get the top prices for their customers.“For example, today, we had a gun we put out here and we put $1,000 on it because that’s what they’re getting online. We have a customer come in and they will say that it’s ridiculous and that we’re gouging them, but you know, I sometimes think we should put it on a gun broker and not start arguments here about prices because we know we can get that much money. If they want it, they can buy it if they’re willing to pay the price, but if we were charging too much, the guns would still be sitting here,” he said.Besides guns, other big trends that the pawnshop is seeing include gold, silver, coins and automobiles of all kinds.When big trends start to wear down, prices for those items decrease.“We got overburdened on tools, electric drills and things like that. So many guys are out of work in construction and everybody sold or got rid of their tools. Consequently, we got an overabundance of tools. We still take them, but we sell them cheap and we can’t pay a lot for them,” Lane said.His son added that car audio equipment also took a big hit recently.The shop also sees a lot of seasonal items.“Air conditioners — we buy every one we can get in the wintertime because we know in the summertime, they will sell. It’s the same way with kerosene heaters,” Wes Lane said.Items they absolutely won’t take?“Bowling balls,” Lane said. “People bring in appliances like toasters and we don’t take that, either.”Pontiac Exchange also boasts multiple shelves of engagement rings, wedding sets, bracelets, necklaces and other assorted jewelry. Does Lane believe that those pawned rings hold bad karma from the random broken engagement or divorce?“I could give you a good example. When you walk in a jewelry store, and let’s say it’s a big jewelry store and you see row after row of diamond rings. You know about 11 percent of those diamonds are new?” he asked. “Diamonds to start with are over a billion years old and diamonds have been cut in the modern cut since 1904. All the diamonds that have been cut since 1904 for over 100 years have been recycled. Nobody throws them away. They’re recycled. You could buy what you think is a brand new wedding set and that diamond may have been in five other rings before you ever got it. If there’s karma with it, you may be carrying karma from five different people. A lot of people don’t think about that.”He continued, “Those diamonds are reset time after time after time. That’s one of the big things pawn shops do is sell diamonds to the diamond industry. The only way you can tell if you have a diamond that nobody else has had is if you go to South Africa, watch them pull it out, watch them cut it and you bring it back yourself, otherwise, you don’t know how many different rings that diamond has been in.”Lane pointed out that his store has donated items and given monetary donations totaling more than $85,000 to children’s organizations, police, fire departments, as well as items for auctions in an attempt to raise money for various fundraisers throughout the years. He says it’s very important for the business to give back to the community it serves.Pontiac Exchange is located at 911 Custer Ave. in Pontiac, and can be reached by phone at 815-842-3221.